I am involved in an open source project called Rolodap. My company uses
Rolodap in its day-day operation.
Rolodap is a group contacts manager. Its underlying assumptions are
these, I have added some observations from my companies usage:
---------------
(1) there are substantial benefits in a small business to having a
shared contacts manager in which a database has each entry made one time
as this minimizes the update/entry burden .
Experience:
We have gradually been converting our office (a medium sized law firm
with 130 deskstops and multiple offices) over to Rolodap. At present we
have about 20k entries in Rolodap. Users have had a little trouble
getting the concept of a shared contacts manager, but as they do their
response has been very good. At present when we add a new user, about
50% of their contacts (stored in an old individual application, or in
Netscape address books) are duplicates. As we add users we expect that
percentage to increase. It is indirectly an indication of how much
waste effort there is in dupolicate entry/maintenance work.
Rolodap does allow the organization of the shared contacts into
indivdiualized addressbooks, though all rely on the same shared
underlying pool of contacts.
(2) LDAP is a desirable basis for a contacts manager as many public
directories can be presently incorporated by minor coding, and in the
future, referral will be automatic. LDAP also allows users to use almost
any email client and have auto-completion of addresses.
Experience:
We recently added the ability to direct enquiries to the University of
Wisconsin's public LDAP server by checking a box (we are in Madison ,
Wisconsin). This added search capabilities of an additional 40,000
entries. The State of Wisconsin, as with many states, has a project to
put all state employees into a public LDAP directory. When this wends
its way out of the intra-agency political morass, we will add it.
Users like the referral feature and the auto-completion feature.
We recently surveyed our users. About 85% found Rolodap easy to use and
needing only minimal training (though several commented on the need to
grasp the "shared" concept). A a majority regarded the
feature/complexity balance as currently about right.
---------------------------------------
Rolodap uses OpenLDAP and php. There is a demo, unfortunately several
versions back, at http://www.dewittross.net/rolodap .
I am interested in broadening the development support for Rolodap.
It strikes me that Rolodap is a good fit with e-smith (or aXonlinux <g>)
because e-smith has OpenLDAP/PHP and, in my opinion, needsa contact
manager. To accomplish a fit would require:
(1) Work on the administration/intstall end to fit into the e-smith
framework for installation and administration.
(2) Rework of the rpm to fit e-smith's peculiarities.
My question is simple. Is there any interest in including Rolodap and is
there anyone interested in working on those two problems?
Regards,
John Lederer
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